Spencer Lund

Figurative Onanism

The gift of excitement

Picture you’re going camping with your friends. You drive five hours into the middle of nowhere, and get a cabin for the night. The cabin sits on the edge of a large lake, and you can’t see or hear the sound of humans anywhere. You’re totally alone and isolated.

Now imagine rowing out to an island on the lake with your friends, and finding a bottle sticking out of the ground. It’s a small island and it’s location is remote enough to imagine a virgin land ignored by the vestiges of a human race that stole the land from indigenous people hundreds of years earlier. So what is this man-made bottle doing here?

You dig the half-submerged bottle out of the ground. It looks like any old wine bottle, but there’s something inside. It appears to be a piece of paper, and you can see the faint lines of writing on one side of the rolled up sheet. You decide to go back to the mainland and figure out how you’re going to get this paper out of the bottle.

On the way back to the mainland in the canoe, you and your friends discover something metallic and shiny in the bottle as well. Could it be a key? Your friends excitedly discuss the possibilities of treasure or even something more outrageous.

Back at the cabin, after looking the bottle over, and pulling the wooden cork out, you finally decide there’s no other possibility except to smash the bottle to retrieve what’s inside. You smash the bottle on the rocks surrounding your fire pit and discover a rolled up paper with writing, and a key. It’s a fuckin’ key. What the hell did you just find? What does the paper say?

The paper is rotted with age and time, and in dark, flowing cursive it reads:

Take this key to unlock the secrets of times past at the rear of Father Mulligan’s Prayer House.

Everyone is confused.

You and your friends remember the owner of the cabin mentioning on the way in that the tool shed which flanks the cabin on the left side was the home of a preacher in the 1800s. He would proselytize to the loggers in the surrounding area near the many lakes of the region. Growing excited, you go around to the shack that now houses the owner’s carpentry tools.

You don’t see anything at the rear of the shack, and continue to wander and offer guesses aloud about what the hell is happening. A few yards removed from the rear of the shack sits a small clearing with a tree trunk that’s only been half-uprooted and forms a sort of lean-too housing sticks, shrubs and all manner of insects and creatures. You look at this rotting trunk and realize its the perfect place to put something. There are weird markings on the trees surrounding this spot.

Blair Witch comes to mind, but you’re not 12.

You call to your friends, and together you start to poke and prod in the dark corners under the trunk. A few moments pass and still nothing. Then, with an excited grunt, one of your friends hits something metallic. After clearing away the debris you pull out an old weathered lock box. Your friend would say later his

“heart was pounding so hard, it was hard to breath.”

You bring the lock box back to the cabin and fish out the key you found in the bottle. You struggle with the key opening for a few moments…then it clicks into place.

With trepidation, you open the old lock-box, and find a spider’s web encasing an old leather-bound book with photos inside. You open the first page and inside you find arbitrary photos in black and white showing some people in the woods, possibly the same woods you inhabit right now. You’re a bit let down, but everyone is still flipping through the book with an excited awe.

You turn one page in the middle of the book, and see a picture of yourself dancing drunk in your underwear with another friend during a party many years before.

Your mind is collapsing on itself as you try to comprehend what you’re look at.

There’s a wooden cabin, deep in the Acadian Forest, a few of my college buddies go to in order to get away. We all live in New York or Boston, so getting into the wilderness is a way to unwind without the mass of people we’re inundated with on a daily basis.

I say this like it’s some annual tradition, but we’ve only been there three times.

When I say the cabin is deep in the Acadian forest, I’m not using hyperbole. If something bad happens while you’re in this particular stretch of America, like if the shotgun or .44 Magnum you carry to shoot bears was to go off and injure someone, you’re fucked. You’re miles from civilization, let alone a hospital. But, you’re equally as fucked if you happen across an angry bear without the world’s largest handgun or a Remington shotgun, so you gotta practice gun safety. 

Firearms aside, Beddington, Maine is a tiny little hamlet halfway up Maine’s Atlantic Coast. It’s country possessing a pastoral beauty you only find in Wordsworth poems. The isolation is as intoxicating as the finest drug or the most beautiful lover. If you’re wondering what our forefathers experienced when they first saw the “West,” this rural town is a good representation.

It takes a while to get to a place like this.

After driving all the way up to Beddington (five hours from Boston) and pulling into the Airline Snack Bar for a final fuel and bathroom stop—there’s only a spider’s nest disguised as an out-house for a lavatory at the cabin—you’re finally ready to make the final trek.

You head north on Route 9 and turn right onto a nondescript dusty road right after a tiny bridge. From there it’s all cedar, fir, hemlock and land. Lots of it. You end up driving another 20 minutes down the road, then up another dirt road that’s even more secluded than the last turn. You spend 40 minutes traveling slowly by car without a hint of humanity. Once you park in a little clearing of grass, you have to hike another 20 minutes with all your gear and food before actually seeing the cabin. It makes you think of driftwood, beards, and bombastic organs. It’s also incredible.

My friend was the one who came up with the idea. I can’t take credit for such an incredible expedition on my own, but we both collaborated to perform this farce and trick our friend into the exciting 2-3 hours you read about at the beginning.

It took around 3 months of planning for that 2-3 hours of excitement. It was well worth it because the planning was as much fun as the payoff, if there was a payoff. The few people we told of our plan didn’t believe there was no way we’d actually pull it off. One of us would crack a smile at the wrong time or let a seemingly innocuous piece of information drop and that would be it.

The first thing we decided was a planned excursion up to Maine to set our trap before going up later with our friends for the fabricated quest.

The day before we drove up to Maine, we had to do some preparations.

First, I scribbled some anachronistic sounding couplets on some computer paper with a black colored pencil. I attempted a secular Anne Bradstreet voice. I know she’s 17th century OG Americana, but that’s what I was aiming for.

The content included the instructions I mentioned above. Let me explain. The first time me and my friends had visited the cabin, the owner had mentioned a small shack behind the cabin that he used as a tool shed. It had housed a preacher in the 19th century who attempted to woo the woodsmen to the Lord (obviously a Christian Lord) by preaching to the atavistic men in the woods. I have no idea if he was successful, but I doubt it. All of us remember talking about this the first time we went to the cabin.

The plan was for this piece of paper I’d created to be discovered, and then curiosity would take hold of our friends, and they would search around for the booty near the preacher’s shack. That was the plan anyway.

First we had to get everything in order.

We took the ripped shred of computer paper I had written on, and rested it in instant coffee, careful not to submerge it entirely. Then we put it in the oven for 10 minutes on the lowest setting. I rubbed dirt and grass on it. Our “parchment” was ready.

We purchased a beaten-up looking lock-box from ebay, with an old school key. The kinds of keys that are virtually unbreakable (not the usual fare from the cheap steel of today).

After dropping the parchment in an old wine glass with a wooden cork (there was no plastic in the 1800s), we realized the key wasn’t going to fit. We both tried bending the outer edges of the key and realized how tough they made things back in the 50’s, which is when the lock box was constructed (everything made during the WWII era was strong as shit—war manufacturing was about things working rather than saving on cost).

So we took this tough little key outside and after trying various positions found a solid angle to hit the side with a hammer. We used the ground as leverage and successfully bent both edges of the key enough to drop in the wine bottle, but not too much so couldn’t still open the lock-box.

So what was in the lock-box? Six or seven years ago my friend’s had thrown me a surprise party when I moved from DC, and everyone had gotten insanely drunk off the largest bottle of black label Johnny Walker I’ve ever seen and a lot of funky white. At around 4 or 5 am that night a couple of my buddies somehow ended up with their pants around their ankles. A couple girls at the party snapped some pictures and a few months later me and some friends finally got some copies. One picture had two of the friends we planned to trick dancing around in their underwear. We placed that picture amongst an old picture book we again bought off ebay making sure to put it in the middle of the book so they weren’t immediately tipped off when they opened the lock-box.

My friend and I had already laid waste to the treasure map idea. It’s too obvious, and too similar to a crappy Disney movie. Our friend was not an idiot, and we’ve tricked him before so he would be leery of any sort of fantastical odyssey.

There’s a few small islands on the lake, which the cabin sits next to. It’s almost entirely deserted, and when I say almost, I mean we can’t see any other cabins. The surrounding population is sparse enough \we routinely fire off the guns, which crescendo in the valley around the lake, and it’s never been a problem. Again, this is a cabin entirely off the grid.

After we’d buried the lock-box then rowed out and half-buried the bottle on the island, we ate fungus and partied all night, then drove back to Boston the next day. Everything was in order.

In the ensuing month and a half between burying the bottle and the lock box, my friend and I kept wondering if we would pull it off. Everyone else said it couldn’t be done. We weren’t even sure the bottle and lock box would even be in their original spots.

When the weekend finally arrived, everything went according to plan, and our friends got the surprise of a lifetime (note the second person narrative at the opening) It was our gift to him, and he got married this past weekend. Now he’s on his honeymoon and he’s probably going to start a family soon.

He’ll always remember that day and the adventure we were able to give him. Part of me wishes I could have been the one who got surprised. My brain would have been just as confused as his was. I hope he never forgets to look for the half-buried bottle or the hidden lock box.

Here he is all tuckered out after the day’s adventures and quite a bit of Gentleman Jack.

I hope you all get some adventures in life.

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